


you will miss me when i burn

by evenifittakesahundredyears



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: BUT REALLY DEPRESSING, Cunnilingus, EdelBert, F/M, Pre-Timeskip | Academy Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Vaginal Fingering, a bit of self-imposed isolation to start off the day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-21
Updated: 2020-03-21
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:14:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23241580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evenifittakesahundredyears/pseuds/evenifittakesahundredyears
Summary: a companion piece to the sad jackoff fic i recently posted from hubert's POV. edelgard focused. sorry for this one.
Relationships: Edelgard von Hresvelg/Hubert von Vestra
Comments: 21
Kudos: 89





	you will miss me when i burn

**Author's Note:**

> will you miss me when i burn/ and will you eye me with a longing?  
> it is longing that i feel/ to be missed or to be real

Edelgard was no stranger to playing with fire. One could almost argue she’d built her life on it. The stakes with which most of her plans and schemes operated were on the grand, life and death, continental struggle scale. She had a solemn duty to change the world for its own sake and the will and power do it. This little game she played was comparatively trivial— minuscule, of no consequence— and yet somehow it made her palms sweat. Each time she swore she’d never try it again. 

It had started when she was no more than 14 or 15. Before some kind of formal event, this or that banquet or ball, some meeting she couldn’t get out of, the maids would lay out her clothes and jewelry, help her dress, and do her hair and makeup. Acting on an impulse she couldn’t have explained even to herself, Edelgard had tugged a part of her hair out of the elegant coif the maid had earlier styled it into just before 17 or 18 year old Hubert turned up to escort her. She’d acted perturbed about it for show when he knocked, three sharp raps on the door muffled only slightly by the ever present silk gloves, even then. 

“I’m not sure what even happened,” she said with a sigh she hoped didn’t sound theatrical, gesturing at her mussed hair. “Sigrid is usually so good at what she does.”

And just like that she’d gotten exactly what she’d wanted. Hubert had slipped into the room and shut the door with a click that made her shiver, guided her to the chair by the vanity, and delicately brushed and repinned her hair, gloved hands so much gentler than her maid's, fingers on her jaw turning her head a little, just so, to slip a pin in to anchor a braid. 

She’d made a halfhearted comment about not expecting him to be so skilled with women’s coiffure, and he’d given her a little rolling shrug and a sly look and said nothing, quintessential Hubert. Then he’d taken her hand, and she his elbow, and he’d escorted her down to some miserable banquet where she had to talk to some miserable minor noble’s miserable nephew. Business as usual.

After that it was almost always one thing or another— a necklace she’d removed and claimed to have forgotten to put on that she simply couldn’t clasp herself, and if she was lucky, the mechanism would be so dainty that he’d pull off a glove with his teeth and brush the nape of her neck with his perennially cold, bare fingers. It got to the point where the fact that neither of them suggested she get a new maid caused her to feel as though it was a little shared ruse, Hubert doing up the last few buttons on the back of her gown before each event, as though maybe he enjoyed the intimacy she tricked him into as much as she did. Other times she’d think about the Hubert she saw every day, talked with more than anyone, her constant companion and protector from childhood. The distant and closed-off expression he wore when he spoke, the way he couched everything in terms of duty and loyalty. The Hubert who lied to her, directly but more often by omission, about all the things he did, ugly things, to the point that she just stopped asking. The Hubert who patently refused to answer personal questions, who withheld his thoughts and his secrets and his feelings, but still talked about choosing her, choosing this path, walking together. Then she’d feel sure she imagined it, that he saw it as anything other than another facet of his duty, perhaps a bit unorthodox but not difficult or unreasonable and therefore entirely permissible. 

But now she played with fire and raised the stakes. She sat on the edge of her bed in her nightclothes, waiting. She was going to do it, today, potentially the stupidest thing she’d ever done, and there was absolutely no turning back once she’d made her mind up to just burn it all down. And then, as it always did, Wednesday morning, just after dawn, it came: the usual three sharp raps, muffled only slightly by his gloves, of bony knuckles on her hardwood door. 

“Hubert,” she called, “come in.”

This in itself was unusual but not unheard of. She usually only invited Hubert into her room at Garreg Mach if they had something to discuss away from prying eyes and eavesdroppers, or if she wasn’t quite ready but didn’t want to leave him in the hallway. He’d find some little way to assist her, and she still always thought she glimpsed something in him then, in his barely audible “allow me,” before he gently closed the clasp of her collar or brushed her hair and fixed it with ribbons. 

He stepped inside and closed the door with a soft click. She watched him drink in her state of dress, her night things, her unbrushed hair. His appraisal was quick, and subtle, but there was a slight tinge of pink to his pale cheeks afterwards. 

“How may I be of service this morning, my lady?” he asked, briskly and with a neat, clipped bow.

Edelgard sighed and sat down on the edge of the bed, debating how to start. 

“Hubert…” she began, “if I asked you to do something for me, and you found it… distasteful. Would you tell me?”

He was still standing near the door and he regarded her quizzically, almost suspiciously. It took him a while to start talking. “Consider that your asking it of me would inherently make it tasteful to me, your highness.”

She couldn’t help it, she sighed again. This answer wasn’t unanticipated. 

“Sit down, please.” She gestured at the bed beside her, rather than have him sit in the desk chair, which would certainly be his default. 

“If that’s all you want, Lady Edelgard, I can assure you it doesn’t seem so terribly distasteful,” Hubert offered slyly as he took a seat beside her. She rolled her eyes. Well, there was no sense not just getting to it. 

“Do you ever wish for... companionship?” she ventured. 

Hubert looked at her flatly for so long that she thought he wasn’t going to answer. “Your highness, I think you know the answer to that.” 

“I suppose,” she allowed, and realized he must be thinking of all the conversations they’d had over the years where she pushed him to outside interests, to friendships, and he declined. “That is, I mean. For... physical companionship. Intimacy, maybe.” That wasn’t awkward at all. 

“Ah. Well. That is....” Hubert fell silent for a long pause during which Edelgard forcibly reminded herself that it does not become a ruler to squirm. “Our human flesh would have slaves of us all, if we let it,” he finally finished with a shrug. 

A surprisingly intense answer. Maybe Hubert’s blood didn’t run as cold as she told the new professor, after all. She looked long at him. He toyed with a button on the wrist of a glove in an uncharacteristically nervous gesture. 

“Surely it needn’t be all or nothing like that,” she protested.

Hubert was silent in the particular way that meant he disagreed but would never do so directly or out loud. 

“Fine then,” she answered as though he’d spoken. “What if it was me? Would you try it then?” Hubert’s hand froze on the button. Edelgard could feel the tension in his shoulders from where she sat. 

“No,” he said, harshly. Edelgard couldn’t help but feel a bit of hurt, of outrage flare in her at this. She let go of it, let it wash away. A refusal was surprising but more acceptable than a silently grudging acquiescence

“Why not?” She kept her tone level, curious rather than accusatory. 

“I would not,” she noticed his hands shook ever so slightly, “consider myself even close to an adequate choice for you, my lady.”

She knew it was cruel, but she couldn’t resist. “Could you recommend someone else then? Someone suitable? Perhaps a list.” She watched his hands ball into fists and his mouth press into a tight thin line. 

“On the contrary,” she spared him from answering. “I can think of no one more trustworthy and discreet.” Edelgard found herself hesitating, but she’d come this far. “Was that the only reason, then?” She had one more card up her sleeve but she wasn’t going to play it without offering him one last out. Hubert fiddled with the button. 

“Yes.” His tone was firm— yes, but I mean it. 

Edelgard took a deep breath. Maybe she should feel nervous, in the moment upon which everything hinged, but rather she felt excited, like she did before battle. “What if I wasn’t _asking_?”

The question hung there in the air for a single tense second, and then in an instant, Hubert had taken her face in his hands and turned her roughly towards him and kissed her. Whatever reaction she had been anticipating, it hadn’t been this. He kissed her desperately, fervently, sloppy and fierce. It was nothing like Edelgard had always imagined, it was somehow _better_. Hubert wasn’t touching her like she was made of spun glass, he was gripping and pulling at her, fisting his hands in her hair like a drowning man thrown a lifeline. He pulled back after a few moments, just a few breathless inches, and looked into her face, eyes wild. 

“Tell me to stop,” he panted, chest heaving. “Please. You must.” 

“I’m sorry, Hubert,” she said on an exhale, not unkindly. She used the epaulets of his academy uniform for leverage to pull him back in. She wasn’t sorry. 

A gloved hand on the back of her neck, another gripping her thigh, the cool slide of a well worn leather boot against her naked calf. There was a hunger to the way Hubert kissed her, a naked desperation in his touch, that she couldn’t have anticipated from her dedicated but distant and reserved retainer.

Should she have seen this in him? She thought, unbidden, of ten thousand little examples— the gentle touches when he helped her get ready before a formal event, where even his voice was softer than normal, something private and wordless there for the two of them, alone, outside of time and duty. The way he watched her waltz with some Imperial Minister’s son or another, standing way back at the edge of the hall and radiating chill air, and the way those same boys sometimes disappeared, died in riding accidents or of sudden illnesses, or enlisted in distant armies if they showed interest in calling on her again. He never said anything, unless she asked him directly, in which case he’d make a mild comment about it being a terrible shame but not being sure they were of her caliber anyway. 

Still, there was something careful in it, despite the fervor— he didn’t push things forward, wouldn’t be the one to escalate, just took every opportunity she offered him with greed, with hunger, like he couldn’t help himself. When she grabbed him by the hair, firmly, and dragged his face to her neck, he groaned audibly just before he went to work as directed, and this, too, was just as she wanted it, needed it. She could feel the bruises, teeth marks, that would still undoubtedly be visible for the next couple of days— the high collar of the military academy uniform was a blessing after all. 

She indulged in this attention for a little while— a large hand gripping her waist and one tangled in her hair, ardent lips and teeth and tongue on the sensitive, unmarked skin of her neck, her shoulder. She felt breathless with it, drunk almost, and even comparing it to her dreams seemed like an asinine endeavor; there was no comparison. The church bells rang seven times. She slipped her fingers under his chin. He looked up at her, obedient, expectant.

“Hubert…” she said, and if there was something fond in her tone she refused to hear it. “On your knees. Please.” If she had any doubts about the validity of her actions, they evaporated in the face of the look in his eyes in that moment. She shifted on the edge of the bed, making space for him between her knees, and gestured at the floor between her feet. He slid to obey, still staring into her face with that look, and she realized it wasn’t an unfamiliar one to her. Once, on what should’ve been a routine bandit clean up, Hubert had taken an unlucky arrow clean through his shoulder, with no one else nearly close enough. After she screamed for someone to get Mercedes von Martritz and confirmed that she was coming, Edelgard had whipped off her ascot, folded it up, and stuffed it into Hubert’s mouth to bite down on as he lay on the ground. She’d then told him “this is going to hurt, I’m afraid, but you’re no use to me dead,” braced a knee on his unwounded shoulder, snapped the head of the arrow off, and yanked the rest of the shaft back out of his flesh by the fletching. She’d expected him to scream, and he did, but he also looked up at her almost exactly as he did now, on his knees before her on the worn throw rug. Interesting. She wondered if he had a scar, what it looked like, pictured briefly a pale shoulder, a lean chest. She pushed that thought aside. 

She looked down at Hubert, who looked up at her, rapt. 

“Let’s not play coy _now_ ,” she said, projecting a confidence it was hard to actually feel. 

He raised an eyebrow. “Of course not, my lady,” he said, and leaned in, pressing a gentle, tentative kiss to the inside of her thigh. He glanced up at her without moving away, and she gave him a minute nod. He went to work in earnest then, kissing, licking, biting up the inside of her pale, scarred thigh. He took her knees in his hands, cool even through the soft silk gloves, and simultaneously pushed them apart and tugged her closer to the edge of the bed. He leaned the rest of the way in, pushing her nightshift up around her hips, and ran a flat tongue up the length of her slit. He didn’t hesitate before diving in, he approached this with the same fervent hunger with which he had kissed her, like this was all he thought about, like he needed it. Edelgard bit down on her knuckle to keep herself silent, and tangled her other hand in his unruly dark hair, pushing it back from his face. He opened his eyes, the green of a new spring leaf, and flicked his gaze up to her face. Something about the eye contact made her blush, she could feel it, and she tried to force it back. She tugged sharply on the handful of hair and Hubert’s eyes slipped closed again. He moaned, muffled by his face between her legs and she felt the blush on her cheeks deepen. Hubert shifted his attention fully to her clit, increasing both pressure and pace, and she fell back onto her elbows, working not to cry out. His grip left her thighs and she sat up to look, just before one silk glove and then the other were cast onto the bed beside her. He teased her entrance with a fingertip momentarily, lips and tongue still busy driving her mad, and then slid one long digit inside. She fell back and clutched a pillow to her face to muffle her drawn out whimper. She was soaking wet, she could feel it, and a vague thought as to how she was going to get these sheets laundered without starting a scandal drifted through the back of her mind. After a few slow, experimental drags in and out of her slick passage, Hubert added another finger. He lapped insistently at her clit all the while, and she found herself making truly pathetic sounds into the desperately held pillow. 

She felt more than heard Hubert’s own moan against her, a low, catching sound, like he hadn’t meant or wanted to do it and tried to stop it at the last second. Edelgard propped herself back up to look at him. His eyes were closed in a look of apparent rapture and he— hm. She craned her head to the side and sat up a little straighter, looked down Hubert’s body to find, yes, he had one hand just pressed sort of desperately to the bulge in the front of his trousers. He wasn’t doing anything, he wasstill, just helplessly palming himself. The sight made something clench and coil in the pit of her stomach and she knew she couldn’t possibly last much longer. 

“Hubert...” she breathed on a heavy exhale. His eyes shot open and he saw how she’d positioned herself to look, where she was looking. It was hard to read his face with half of it pressed to her sex, but something about his brows drawing up and together and the deepening pink on his already flushed cheeks suggested sheepishness, though he didn’t stop. The eye contact, the naked adoration in his gaze, the way he curled the two fingers he slid in and out of her just so, the knowledge that he was so aroused that he couldn’t help but touch himself as he pleasured her, his tongue insistent against her, her hand once again in his hair, softer than she would’ve guessed, and she was pulling at it, she was going to— she felt herself babbling but couldn’t make it stop. 

“Hubert, I’m, yes, I’m so— I’m going to—“ 

And she woke up, tangled in the bedsheets, damp with sweat, hair stuck to her face. She felt herself throbbing, the dream had ejected her at the most frustrating possible moment. She groaned, rolled over, feeling the slickness between her thighs, the slide of it, as she did. A single beam of light caught her just across the face through the curtains, just as it always did, which meant that she had precious little time before Hubert knocked on her door to drag her off for early morning extra training. Still, she had absolutely no chance of behaving normally if she tried to face him like this, and precious little chance of making it through the day with her sanity intact. She’d just have to be quick, she thought, as her hands slid down her body in a pale imitation of the way she’d been touched in her dream. She rolled over onto her stomach to muffle any sounds she couldn’t help making, and any names that may or may not accidentally escape her lips. 

If Hubert knocked this morning, she didn’t hear it. She wondered about it, panting and hastily washing the sweat from her face and neck. She wondered if he’d heard her through the adjoining wall and decided to give her some privacy, or if he was just too mortified to interrupt. She couldn’t really bring herself to care. Maybe he’d just overslept, Hubert was human too. Even as she tried to make herself think it, she’d chuckled at that. He was barely human at best, there was no chance he forgot. Still, unless she was going to acknowledge the elephant in the room, and she saw no way to do that without blurting out the whole of it, she’d just have to pretend that she’d _also_ forgotten, something which she knew he knew was equally implausible. She thought about just spitting it out on the training floor, her axe knocked aside, Hubert’s dagger at her throat: 

“I dream about fucking you.”

What would his face look like? She couldn’t even imagine it. She’d favor her odds of winning the bout after that, at the very least. Fortunately, they’d gotten very good at this kind of dance, where they both knew the other more than they were saying, but they danced carefully around it, neither quite lying but nobody being entirely honest, either. Who knew what Hubert kept from _her,_ but she couldn’t imagine it was anything like what she kept from him— the futile and sad passion of someone who, in their loneliness, mistakes service for devotion. 

At breakfast he took only coffee and seemed to avoid her eye. 

**Author's Note:**

> forgive me.
> 
> if you enjoyed this, i'm sorry. do let me know, though, its always nice to meet a fellow ghoul who thrives on suffering and repression.
> 
> i'm on twitter @ghost_museum if you feel compelled to bully me


End file.
